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Remember that time Batgirl stepped out of the shower
and it turned out that the whole existence of Burnside was a dream?

No? That was just my
dream, then? Makes sense, since I was naked and she was fully clothed. Here’s
my review of Batgirl #9.

Explain
It!

So there’s a new popular app in Burnside, this one
with the worst name: Pronghorn. Looks to be a catch-all delivery service, where
messengers wear matching uniforms and everything. You know, they tried this in
New York and other cities right at the height of the dot-com boom, and it was a
disaster. But you still see bike messengers pedaling around with UrbanFetch.com
bags, so at least there’s some legacy. Anyway, a crook uses a baby blue
Pronghorn uniform and a Faraday Bag (that is a bag that conceals all signals
and waves, apparently) to pull a heist on two dudes cranking away on an app in
a cramped Burnside apartment one Saturday afternoon. Fortunately, Batgirl shows
up to stop her. Unfortunately, the criminal gets away. Fortunately, Batgirl
knows to search for the Faraday Bag using a scope that picks up waves, and then
looks for the suppression of a wave, which is exactly how my old roommate
failed his second drug test. Anyway, she catches the robber and then it’s off
to South Burnside Elementary School to ostensibly teach a children’s coding
workshop.

There, the kids are sprung on a new app called Doggo,
where you get a fake dog and then you buy fake things for the fake dog with
real money. So it’s like a lot of actual smart phone apps out there in the
world. That when Barbara and Daniel (the actual teacher) explain data mining
and how her information can be sold to marketing groups, when they should be
asking why the hell a nine year-old is running around playing with this clearly
predatory app in the first place. No time to ruminate on that, though, as
Barbara heads back to her now solely-inhabited apartment to find Alyson on her
stoop sobbing. Barbara invites her in to learn that though she was okay with
her wife Jo being artificially inseminated initially, she has changed her mind,
and now questions the entire relationship. Barbara pats her on the back and
says “there, there,” for about twenty second, and then immediately fucks off
into her bedroom to write a paper for librarian school. She’ll be lucky if Aly
isn’t bleeding out in her living room from a self-inflicted head wound when
Barbara is finished.

Babs has trouble writing the paper because there’s so
much on her mind, so she meditates and tries to apply the eidetic memory on/off
switch that helped her beat up that crazy ninja lady in South Korea. How
turning off your memory will help you write a paper that one would suppose is
based on information you’d, you know, remembered, I’m not sure, but the point
is ultimately moot because her concentration on…not concentrating is broken by
a phone call from Ethan Cobblepot. He’s invited her to a charity masquerade
ball, because that’s a thing super wealthy people do I think. Before she heads
out, she notices that the Doggo app seems to capture a lot of Batgirl cameos,
and Barbara wonders if it is actually technological surveillance of her. And to
make matters more obvious, the Doggo app is part of Ethan Cobblepot’s
app-making company. Hoo boy.

That evening, the ball is held at the Burnside Museum
of Modern Art, which I hear is just as good as the Gotham City Museum but definitely
not as many “top tier” artists. There’s a pretty cool double-page spread where
Barbara and Ethan are bullshitting around a classy pool, among some modern
sculpture (and of course Ethan is wearing the telling and super-creepy “bird
face mask” popularized by the Plague Doctors of the Middle Ages) when he whips
her around a corner and gives her a smooch before telling Babs that he bought
her a toothbrush. She’s relieved that they’re going to fuck, but decides this
is an opportune time to sneak out of the party and go break into Ethan’s
office. She does, gets beaten up by some thugs, only to find that Ethan’s dad
the Penguin is already hanging out there! And he wants to play ping pong!

I guess this was sort of a “day in the life” of
Barbara Gordon, though it sure felt like she was just scrolling through plot
points to refresh the reader on the current status quo before the big last page
reveal that was, arguably, the only really interesting thing in this issue. The
art is really nice, and some of the plotting is quite clever, and I found
myself engaged even during some scenes that did not ring quite true. I do want
to see where this Cobblepot family drama leads, though I’m only marginally
interested in the tech side of things. I hope this story arc ends with the next
issue.

Bits and
Pieces:

The basics of Barbara Gordon's world are reinforced and some more smart phone apps revealed in this pleasantly mundane issue of Batgirl. Some nice storytelling choices and an enticing confrontation with the Penguin save this book from a direct comparison to Young Romance. But it could be, still!

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